BaL 16.04.11 - Prokofiev: Symphony no. 6

[Il Grande Inquisitor]

Gergiev was the "winner" and it seems a good choice.

No, not a massive surprise. I listened to it again last night and it is superb. I was at the Barbican for the Prokofiev cycle back in 2004 and I think it was this series which 'sealed the deal' in making Gergiev the LSO's new Chief Conductor.

Excellent work from Jonathan Swain.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Excellent work from Jonathan Swain.

Agreed, and something of a relief after some recent BaLs

[DoctorT]

Indeed, a 'proper' BaL from a talented presenter. Enough to introduce a new listener to the work, and a useful comparison for those in search of more than one version (even if he was a little dismissive of Jarvi/RSNO!).

[Tevot]

Hello Dr T. Fully agree with your (and others) estimation of the estimable Mr Swain. A thoroughly enjoyable and intelligent programme. I love the work - and first bought the Jarvi / SNO version on lp (heck!) back in 1985 I think. Great seeing / hearing that this account made the short list yesterday ;-) IMHO it still holds up very well.

Best wishes,

Tevot

[pastoralguy]

(even if he was a little dismissive of Jarvi/RSNO!).

Obviously, this has no bareing on a recording but I do know that a LOT of the SNO's recordings with Jarvi were done very quickly with the orchestra often virtually sight-reading unfamiliar material. When Jarvi left Estonia the radio stations destroyed all his recorded work to spite him. The reason for him recording so much in a short space of time was his overwhelming desire to become a 'recorded' artist again. The SNO has always been renowned for it's sight-reading abilities but often it really was a play through before the red light came on.

I remember one of the players telling me that the orchestra turned up thinking they were going to record the Dvorak 'New World' symphony but ended up recording Prokofiev 4 (both versions!!) instead.

I suppose my point is that, yes, the playing might not be perfect but, in real terms it's quite amazing.

[Bryn]

Thank you for that, patoralguy. It gives me cause to hold those recordings in even higher esteem than I already did. I will not rush to order the Gergiev set. I was not particularly enthusiastic about the broadcasts of the performances upon which I believe those CDs were based. However, I will try and 'listen again' to his recording of the 4th on tomorrow's Classical Collection, via the iPlayer, when it becomes available.

[Curalach]

Pastoralguy is correct. Often the orchestra would come back from a break and find music on their stands which they then recorded. It was all a bit like "white heat". Remarkable things were achieved, if not always perfect. They never performed all the Prokofiev symphonies in the concert hall, or indeed much else that they recorded.
The great thing about Jarvi's recordings at that time is that they sound like real performances - they often were. In my view, although he has achieved great things elsewhere with other orchestras, he has never achieved better.
He is a mercurial character. I heard him perform the Leningrad symphony 4 times in one week with the SNO. Every performance was different.
Talking to him a few weeks ago when he was in Glasgow, I can tell you that he still has that unquenchable desire to explore the byways. He is immensly proud that he and the RSNO are recording eveything by Wagner without these troublesome singers!! He has a wonderful sense of humour.

[pastoralguy]

I heard him perform the Leningrad symphony 4 times in one week with the SNO. Every performance was different.

I heard the Edinburgh performance of that work, Curalach. Two things stick in my mind. 1) I used to sit next to a lovely old woman in the upper circle who started going to hear the SNO in the days of Karl Rankle. She could remember the days when the young Alex Gibson first conduvted the SNO. I remember her and I exchanging grins as the first movt. of DSCH 7 got louder and louder!!

I also remembre my fiddle teacher (who was a first violin in the SNO) telling me that each performance of DSCH 7 got a little bit faster here and there so Jarvi could fit it on to a single cd!!

Great days.

[rauschwerk]

Some really interesting information here about Jarvi's Prokofiev recordings. I have collected several of them over the years, beginning with Symphony 6 - one of the first CDs I bought. Finding yesterday that I could download Gergiev's set for £10.99, I did just that. I began listening with No 4 (original version) which I have never found quite convincing under Jarvi's direction. It seems that the RSNO can hardly have known that at all before recording it! It seems to me that Gergiev's performance is superior partly because the LSO had enough rehearsal time to find out exactly how the music should go.

I shall compare versions of No. 6 with great interest.

[Jonathan Swain]

Greetings all. A confession to pastoralguy and others re the SNO Järvi - the limitations of the playing are, always have been, and always will be, of minor significance, when set alongside the reach of the performance. I do wonder though whether the situation the SNO found themselves in for that mostly wonderful spate of Järvi 80s and 90s recordings (their Fairy’s Kiss is rarely out of my CD player for more than a few weeks) was greatly different to that of London orchestras at the time. Järvi’s keenness to record the unfamiliar is legendary, but - to take one example - the LPO can’t have been any more familiar with Prokofiev 2, revised 4 and 6, when Weller recorded the symphonies with them in the 1970s (if you listen with ears on full critical scan to Weller’s set, you can hear bloopers and bad edits aplenty - as many as in the Järvi set, if not more - and the Chandos editing is better - digits probably!). And, to bring things more up to date, the playing in the Gergiev LSO Prokofiev 6 set is far from immaculate at times…. Perhaps the BaL format encourages focusing on the momentary frailties rather than the overall strengths, simply in order to arrive at a ‘top recommendation’. Also, the frailties are easier to demonstrate in short extracts!…. It’s certainly something all BaL reviewers need to be aware of (perhaps I should speak for myself!) …..None of the above though alters my conviction that Gergiev has given us the most compelling Prokofiev 6 on disc to date. Even if the expansive Weller (perhaps above all for his incomparable Decca sound - K. Wilkinson at Kingsway Hall - and at their best - enough said!), and the inspirational Järvi - are equally unmissable. All best wishes, J.

[Nick Armstrong]

Greetings all. A confession to pastoralguy and others re the SNO Järvi - the limitations of the playing are, always have been, and always will be, of minor significance, when set alongside the reach of the performance. I do wonder though whether the situation the SNO found themselves in for that mostly wonderful spate of Järvi 80s and 90s recordings (their Fairy’s Kiss is rarely out of my CD player for more than a few weeks) was greatly different to that of London orchestras at the time. Järvi’s keenness to record the unfamiliar is legendary, but - to take one example - the LPO can’t have been any more familiar with Prokofiev 2, revised 4 and 6, when Weller recorded the symphonies with them in the 1970s (if you listen with ears on full critical scan to Weller’s set, you can hear bloopers and bad edits aplenty - as many as in the Järvi set, if not more - and the Chandos editing is better - digits probably!). And, to bring things more up to date, the playing in the Gergiev LSO Prokofiev 6 set is far from immaculate at times…. Perhaps the BaL format encourages focusing on the momentary frailties rather than the overall strengths, simply in order to arrive at a ‘top recommendation’. Also, the frailties are easier to demonstrate in short extracts!…. It’s certainly something all BaL reviewers need to be aware of (perhaps I should speak for myself!) …..None of the above though alters my conviction that Gergiev has given us the most compelling Prokofiev 6 on disc to date. Even if the expansive Weller (perhaps above all for his incomparable Decca sound - K. Wilkinson at Kingsway Hall - and at their best - enough said!), and the inspirational Järvi - are equally unmissable. All best wishes, J.

I for one had failed to register that you had joined this merry throng, and just wanted to say how great it is to see you here, and to hear once again from the horse's mouth (excuse indelicate metaphor) as we used to on the BBC boards!

Thanks very much for the survey on Saturday and these comments. The Weller recording was the revelation to me. Interesting how British orchestras seem to have cornered the market in this work!

[LeMartinPecheur]

Greetings all.

Jonathan: many thanks for your most interesting BaL. I've mentioned some things you seemed to be saying about the lack of clear performance tradition for Prokofiev 6 in another thread http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...familiar-works.

I for one would be interested in your views on the poster's suggestion about modern orchestral works: that greater precision/ prescription in their scores makes performances and recordings turn out all very similar.

[pastoralguy]

Many thanks indeed for the illuminating posting from Mr. Swain. It's always great to hear from the presenters who actually take part in Bal.

I wasn't trying to compare the London Orchestras with our own RSNO but simply provide a little 'insider information'. No-one (not even me!) is going to pretend that the (R)SNO are on the same level as the LSO or LPO but they are, for those of us in Scotland, the 'home team'. (Similarly, no one in Dumfries is going to pretend that the local football team, 'Queen of the South' is Man. U, but that's not the point. One has to show loyalty to one's local team).

In the 80's, it was very gratifying to see the (R)SNO, which was at a low ebb after the Sir Alex. Gibson era, suddenly winning awards left, right and centre under Jarvi in those halycion days.

Perhaps I could mention a small experience I had in those days? I went to hear the SNO under Jarvi play Prokofiev 5 on an ordinary friday night concert. For some reason, Jarvi took the last (incredibly hard!) last movt. WAY too fast. This is going to end in tears, I thought. There is no way the orchestra can sustain that tempo. The movt. got faster and faster until the final bars were a whirlwind with the orchestra playing through the skin of its teeth. To this day, it's the most exciting thing I have EVER heard in 35 years of concert going!

A few weeks later the Boston Symphony Orchestra played the same work under Ozawa at the Edinburgh Festival and played the finale at the same breakneck speed. It was OK but not a patch on the sheer adrenalin provided by our own under paid, over worked SNO!! (And let's not forget that the mighty Berlin Phil. under Ozawa are probably the most un-memorable set of Prokofiev symphonies on record!)

[Bryn]

This evening I dug out the mp2 of the Performance on 3 DAB broadcast of the May 2004 performance of the 6th (and 7th) which I understand formed the basis of the CD issue. I was not much taken with it at the time, but listening tonight wondered if that had something to do with the DAB encoding artefacts. The performance seemed much more engaging of my attention than when I first heard it. Perhpas I will order the set after all.

[Jonathan Swain]

Jonathan: many thanks for your most interesting BaL. I've mentioned some things you seemed to be saying about the lack of clear performance tradition for Prokofiev 6 in another thread http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...familiar-works.

I for one would be interested in your views on the poster's suggestion about modern orchestral works: that greater precision/ prescription in their scores makes performances and recordings turn out all very similar.

Hello LeMartinPecheur. You are absolutely right! I don’t have a fixed idea of how Prokofiev 6 ought to go. And there are no metronome marks in the score (at least, not the score I have). I think the tempo template for many will be Mravinsky - especially in the first movement (the most difficult movement to bring off) - with Mravinsky choosing tempos (flowing ones) that give the movement a sense of purpose and symphonic coherence. If there is a performance tradition for Prokofiev 6, then Mravinsky began it, and critical reaction to subsequent recordings of the symphony seems mostly to have been based on Mravinsky’s way with the symphony (an example to be followed). And Mravinsky was the template I had in mind when I started the listening for the BaL. ….So, in theory Weller’s more expansive and meditative approach to the first movement is ‘wrong’, as, to a lesser extent, is Järvi slowing as much as he does for the first movement’s second theme. …..But I found them convincing on their own terms. For me, they more than justified their departure from the ‘template’….. I know there are some (especially if they know Mravinsky’s way with the piece) who will listen to Weller in mvts. 1 and 2 and think something along the lines of ‘get a move on!’. But I never felt that. ….. Why?…. I think it’s a question of Weller’s skilful and expressive rubato, and the dark beauty of the playing (and the recorded sound). Weller is of course a very fine violinist, and the LPO’s string playing (in particular the violas) in the first movement has its own unique allure - you (or rather I) sense a meeting of minds here between conductor, players and recording engineer, to make something special of all the string writing. …..So, I can’t reject it on the grounds that it doesn’t conform to the ‘template’ and achieve whatever we might mean by ‘symphonic coherence/purpose’ in the first movement …. These are the kind of thoughts and reactions it is difficult to work into the BaL format! (it is also nigh on impossible in BaL to demonstrate this or that conductor’s grasp of architecture!). …. For what it’s worth, the reviewer as quoted by Ferretfancy for Jurowski’s Holst Planets seems to me more interested in being polemical than practical. I don’t believe for a second that a few niceties of phrasing and orchestral detail are all that separate one recording of The Planets from another. All best wishes, J